Spike Lee's savage satire Bamboozled should not in any way be confused with Harold Ramis' comic romp Bedazzled, which also opens today.
Bamboozled is a good film, Bedazzled a good movie. One is jazz, the other a pop tune. One plays head games, the other tickles the funny bone.
This review is about Bamboozled, which, despite my rave rating and unlike Bedazzled, is not a movie for everyone. It looks awful in grainy, colour-drained digital video -- Lee could not get the budget to shoot it on film.
Spike Lee is a love-him-or-hate-him kind of guy. But he certainly knows how to get your attention. Do not, however, confuse that with his absolutely unfair reputation as a filmmaker who stirs up trouble for its own sake. That's a label he got from bigots who secretly are afraid of his films.
Armed with a keen intelligence, a trenchant wit and the willingness to fight dragons, Lee is a social commentator. In Bamboozled, he tackles the world of American television. The film looks at how the race card is played -- and ups the stakes.
A black TV writer (Damon Wayans) and his whip-smart assistant (Jada Pinkett-Smith) are under extreme pressure from their bozo boss (Michael Rapaport) to invent a new hit show.
Wayans decides to introduce an old-fashioned, all-black and all-black-face variety show called Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show. The line between 'satire' and racist drivel begins to blur as the show, which re-creates old black comedy routines and features a house band called The Alabama Porch Monkeys, takes off and becomes a stunning success.
It is so wildly 'hip' that live audiences, white and black, show up in blackface and throw words such as "nigger" around with abandon. Meanwhile, others are outraged and join protests led by Rev. Al Sharpton (who plays himself on screen).
There is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink thing going on. Most of the time, you know it's a satire. Lee even disses himself by name, as well as other targets. At the same time, Lee stages the minstrel show with such panache and verve that he instantly confuses us -- and it is obviously done deliberately.
Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, as the song-and-dance comedy team, are so genuinely terrific that we are tortured by guilt. Questions are raised: Can comedy be both wonderfully funny and despicable at the same time? What is a racist? What is racism? What are the limits? Should anything be censored?
Inside the story, all those questions are raised in explicit terms, but the answers are delivered with escalating violence.
Too much so for my taste, because the overlong Bamboozled loses its path before recovering, at the end, with its extraordinary compilation of real TV and film footage of enslaved (yet brilliant) black performers of the past.
Bamboozled is a satire with a bite even more vicious than its bark.
(This film is rated R)
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